We have come to the end of our first week in performing “The Maids”…which has been a hydrogen bomb of gorilla theater warfare, in-all.
…Each night has had a surprisingly vast difference in performance, as well as audience reception, for something so closely and intricately choreographed, containing only three people in a one-hour show with no intermission break. Live theater is just that…and boy-howdy if this doesn’t live up to the zenith of definition in that aspect.
The show is a wild animal. We’ve attempted to domesticate it to a certain capacity that you can feel somewhat safe being in the same room with it…but the “on-top-of-us” intimacy of seating, the brutal heat of non-airconditioned space with stage lights blaring, the slight of hand and turn on a dime in fury and danger one moment, to intimate whispers the next, makes a whirlwind of wet, hot, suffocation literally palpable in the space we share with the audience. When we talk of the binds of our confinement, they can feel it too…and when we unravel into dangerous dark webs of chaos, they are forced to sit in the eye of the cyclone right along with us.
…And at the end…when we dissolve into the quiet, sweaty, sinus-draining, mess of horror…the lights come up…to a few beats of silence and tentative clapping…because everyone (including the people taking their bows on stage) are too overwhelmed, to manage much more than that.
…So then the actors retreat to our makeshift green room, we peel off our completely soaked-through undergarments, we mop at our faces and baby-wipe-bathe ourselves best as we can manage, before putting on street clothes and joining the “salon” of wine drinkers, milling about the bookstore. It is then, after they’ve had a breath or two, a wine or two…after they’ve removed themselves from the heat of the stage lights and dripping sweat, and spewing effluvium out in front of them…that they collect themselves enough to attempt to wrap their head around what they have just seen.
…And by and large, the bulk of the patrons present (not belonging to Academia) seem to come up with the same question: “What the fuck was that?”
…Which is (by and large) why non-conventional theater is not my favorite.
I’ve liquidated out of every orifice, filled my brain with pictorial horrors, gotten bruised from crawling on cement floors, blistered by heels, fought dehydration headaches, agonized over line interpretation, humped chairs, brought myself to pitch of orgasm in public, wailed injustice, clawed at my body like an animal, and pushed to justify a sick and twisted game, a murder, a dissolve into total insanity…and at the end, I’d like to think it is understood “Why.”
When people see this, and can only shake their head in wonder and say, “I don’t understand”…it makes one feel like they bled and fought and died without reason. And that, I think, is the battle fatigue I was NOT ready to undertake.
I KNOW it’s a lot. I UNDERSTAND that it’s everywhere and intense. I GET that the language is crazy and poetic and strange…that the characters are multiplied with many separate personalities…that it houses uncomfortable scenes and language and politics and realities. I know because I’ve been fighting to figure them out too. And I’ve had a great deal more time with the script than you just sitting there, seeing it for the first time. I know that it is the nature of the beast that this is the kind of theater it was specifically built for…a varied interpretation and NOT answering all the questions, or feeding you answers you are comfortable with. But that realization doesn’t magically make it easier to take when facing someone who just traveled with you for an hour and fifteen minutes and says at the end of it, “I don’t get it.”
Absurdist theater isn’t for everyone. I myself, am not particularly a fan. I did it for the challenge. I did it to work with a director I respect, and a company I love. I did it because it was messy and massively infringing in its mental and physical demands. I did it, ultimately, because the thought of it scared the living shit out of me, I trusted the leader in power, and felt ready to jump off a new artistic cliff.
…I wouldn’t take the decision back.
It is massively difficult.
My body and mind are infringed and uncomfortable with every performance.
I do throw everything I have at it…damning the consequences on if I fly or fall.
I have done both.
But being open, being seen in it is a different kind of “uncomfortable” than I was prepared for it to be. At the end of the night, when I come out in street clothes to patrons in the lobby…it isn’t me they are greeting. It is this…after-taste. They don’t know what to say. They question but don’t know how to phrase it. They recognize the intensity, but not necessarily the nuance that goes with it. Every once in a while, someone who can see the layers, will grasp on for a short tete-a-tete…but mostly, not. Mostly, they don’t know what to say…(and after all that, I certainly do not.) Mostly they just smile awkwardly, or nod a “good job” then retreat with their wine to a further corner, to talk amongst themselves while occasionally leering at me on the sly.
…As if Solange is still there in the room with them…and they have to keep a tentative eye out, just in case I might flip my shit one final time and set fire to the book stacks, et al.
As a practiced player of bitches, whores and baddies, I had long ago learned to take these sort of after-show reactions as a complement…proof I’d done a good job…they couldn’t disassociate the actor from the performance, and that meant you’ve emotionally “got” them.
…But there’s a confession to make in this one, that I’ve genuinely never felt as a performer before. And it’s agonizing.
At shows end…
…I go into the green room.
…I strip off my soaking wet costume.
…I sop up my face with towels.
…I put on my street clothes.
…And I come out to a lobby full of patrons drinking wine and talking about this show they can’t quite put their finger on.
…And when even one innocent patron braves the front to come and talk to me, Solange looks out my eyes back at them…still totally destroyed with the actions of the night, thinking, “I gave you everything…how, how…how after all of that, do you still not understand?”
I’ve played some difficult roles, some mental mayhem’s, some twisted sisters in my time. But this is the first show where I’ve traveled so far and internalized it so deep, that even I have a hard time finding “Me” once again, at the end of the night.
…The most dangerous game I mount in this show…is the role itself.
Which makes this, the most demanding and vicious piece of work I’ve ever done.
…And it frankly scares the shit out of me.
Every night.
~D
